September, Taking Wing

It is the first Tuesday in September, and village children are off to school, walked there (or just to the bus stop) by nannies, proud parents, big brothers and sisters, and occasionally family pets. I have known many of the kids since they traveled about in prams, and here they are going off to school. Dear me, how time flies.

This morning, yellow school buses are rumbling along village streets, something we have not seen for a few months. The cheerful crossing guard who has presided over a nearby corner for years was back on duty in his orange vest, and we compared notes on how our summers had gone. He fished and played a lot of golf. Beau and I tended our garden and did a little rambling. We were happy with how things had gone this time around. Before the wretched tumble, that is. 

The youngsters wear jackets in confetti colors, carry backpacks and lunch boxes in pink, turquoise and lime green, tote miniature umbrellas patterned in flowers or bunnies or polka dots. They bloom like pint-sized peonies out in the street, and watching them from the window, I feel like doing a little blooming too.

Only a short distance away, other brightly arrayed children have hatched out in village gardens, hedgerows and thickets, and they are strengthening their magnificent orange wings for the long journey south to begin in a week or two. I love this time of the year, but I am always sad when the youngsters leave home.

When monarchs alight on fall asters in the garden, the combination of orange, purple and gold is dazzling. Every butterfly is a stained glass jewel, a wild, vivid and breathtaking wonder. Lacking a clearly visible black pheromone spot on the rear wing, the butterfly at the top of this post may be female, but I am not sure. Sometimes the spot is not visible in profile.

There are vibrant colors everywhere we look in early September, and they are a sumptuous treat for old eyes. It doesn't matter whether the riotous tints are on Virginia creepers, monarch butterflies, coneflowers or tiny raincoats - they invite us to kick up our heels and dance, or more likely just stumble and lurch about.

Sequestered, Week 310 (CCCX)

Happy September!

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

Those places where our spirit is in harmony with the landscape call to us. Some of us feel at home where we are born; others look for it in places they’ve never been but long to find. Discovering the source of our sense of place, belonging finally to and in a fixed and particular landscape engenders a kind of relationship. It makes us care for soil and air and water in a deep way we will not feel if the countryside around us is a franchised, faceless and anonymous blur.

Fred First, from What We Hold in Our Hands
(with Fred's kind permission) 

Morning Offering

Friday Ramble - Little Ordinaries of the Season

It's small things that engage one's attention at this time of year: fallen leaves like confetti on the dock at the lake, trees raining acorns and crabapples, sunflowers inclining their heads and sending thousands of seed children out into the world, damp furrows where veggies flowered, fruited and have been gathered in.

Trees in the garden were touched by cool fingers overnight, and their grip on summer’s foliage has loosened. The fallen leaves rustle wonderfully underfoot. Bergamots, mints and sages planted for the bees and butterflies have gone to seed, and fall bloomers are sporting buds. One artfully curving branch on the ash tree behind the potting shed has already turned brilliantly yellow.

In the park, beech leaves float down in burnished, windblown drifts and come to rest on the trail at our feet. Sunlight flickers through the overstory as though through clerestory windows, and the woods feel like a cathedral that goes on and on forever. I am reminded of something John Crowley wrote in his incandescent novel, Little, Big: "The further in you go, the bigger it gets."

September is only a few days away, and autumn is already in the air. The little ordinaries of this liminal time between the seasons conjure an earthy litany that is colourful and spicy on the tongue, touched with a leaf-dusty fragrance that follows us wherever we totter and shamble and lurch.

Swallows are congregating on telephone lines before flying south, and skeins of geese move to and fro between rivers and farm fields. A new generation of monarch butterflies is testing its wings before flying south. Soon, the loons on our favorite lake will be calling goodbye as they head for warmer moorings, and the great herons will not be far behind them. Is it just me, or is there a restless spirit loose in the village and haunting the countryside at this time of the year?

It is cool here this morning, and far from recent thoughts of salads and cold drinks, I find myself pondering soups and stews, corn fritters and gingerbread, roasted squash, the first McIntosh apples lovingly folded into a baked crumble with oatmeal, maple syrup and cinnamon. Always, there is tea. Thinking about comfort food and culinary undertakings is a sure indication of autumn, all by itself.

Life becomes quieter as daylight hours wane. Temperatures decline, and migratory kin head for warmer climes. Leaves fall, and things go to seed. The light in this corner of the great wide world ebbs and flows. We watch what is happening around us, and we drink in every blessed thing like wine. Collars up against the wind, we potter about and peer into hedgerows and thickets. We feast our senses. Then we come home to tea and toast and molasses cookies. Home is a lovely word in any season.

Thursday Poem - To Be of Use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes

almost out of sight. They seem

to become natives of that

element, the black sleek heads of seals

bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves,

an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like

water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck

to move things forward, who do what

has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field

deserters but move in a common

rhythm when the food must come

in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles

to dust. But the thing worth doing

well done has a shape that satisfies,

clean and evident. Greek amphoras

for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn,

are put in museums but you know

they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

Marge Piercy from Circles on the Water

Wordless Wednesday - Benched

Maggie Needs a Makeover

I discovered Maggie in a supermarket bargain bin years ago, and carried her home where she has presided over the garden for many summers. The lady is a trouper, but after several years, she really needs a makeover and a new wardrobe. Either I get down to brass tacks and give her what she urgently needs or I toss her into the rubbish bin. In light of her long and distinguished service, that would be heartless.

The old girl's straw tresses are hanging in strings. Her papier mâché face is cratered and flaking. Her burlap hat is tattered, and her once elegant ensemble is now a faded collection of frayed patches and blowing bits. For all that, she wears a wide grin.

I have a spool of raffia I can use to replace her tatty hairdo and an old cotton sun hat that will do nicely as a topper, but the best option for a substitute frock is probably a toddler's outfit from a local thrift shop. Getting out to such a place is going to be difficult given my present mobility issues, but I am working on it. 

My tatterdemalion (love that word) friend prefers to be a raggamuffin, and however her new clobber turns out, that will have to be taken into consideration. Perhaps I can sew a few patches on her new outfit? I am fond of her and will do whatever it takes. She reminds me of the stuffed Raggedy Ann doll I had as a child, and I hope to see her smiling face in the garden for many years to come. 

Sequestered, Week 309 (CCCIX)

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

And what is this wild summons? What art is asked of us? The gift offered is different for each but all are equal in grandeur. To paint, draw, dance, compose. To write songs, poems, letters, diaries, prayers. To set a violet on the sill; stitch a quilt; bake bread; plant marigolds, beans, apple trees. To follow the track of the forest elk, the neighborhood coyote, the cupboard mouse. To open the windows, air beds, sweep clean the corners. To hold the child’s hand, listen to the vagrant’s story, paint the elder friend's fingernails a delightful shade of pink while wrapped in a blanket she knit with the deft young fingers of her past. To wander paths, nibble purslane, notice spiders. To be rained upon. To listen with changed ears and sing back what we hear. 

Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart's Starling

Harbinger

And so it goes..... The sun rises later and sets earlier. Mornings are slightly cooler, and fewer cicadas are performing in the dear old trees in the village. Pots of bright chrysanthemums are starting to appear on thresholds, and autumn is in the air.

When Beau and I went out to the deck around four this morning, the constellation Orion was poking its head above the southeastern horizon, and we waved to it. Then we went back into the house for a good cup of coffee and toast. Beau does not do coffee of course, but he loves a fine bit of hot buttered toast.

When the sun rose, I grabbed my cane and tottered out to the veggie patch to weed, water, tidy up a bit and check on the tomatoes. The exercise was painful, but the deed got done. A little tenacity and obdurate self-sufficiency go a long way.

My daughter and her husband will visit later today and liberate a lovely big bag of curly kale. If not for the trashed ankle, I would probably be trundling a barrow of the stuff around the neighborhood and dispensing it to everyone I meet. Is there a goddess of cruciferous vegetables? Just call me Pomona, or perhaps Demeter.

Friday Ramble - Abundance

I awaken early and lurch out to the garden wearing a faded cotton caftan, straw hat and sandals, carrying my cane and a mug of Earl Grey. In the wake of last week's tumble, the stick is a must. Best not to go base over apex into the tomato patch. The vines have taken off in all directions, and I might not be found for days.  

The only sentient beings happy about the heat are the ecstatically foraging bees and the ripening vegetables in village veggie patches: beans, peppers, tomatoes, kale, chards and emerging gourds. Are veggies sentient, and do they have Buddha nature? You bet they do, and I suspect they converse among themselves when we are not listening. The zucchini vines (as always) are on the march and threatening to take over entire gardens, if not the whole wide world. Ditto the kale which adores the kind of weather we are having this summer.

The tomatoes are a marvel. Scarlet or gold, occasionally purpled or striped, they come in all sizes and some surprising shapes. The first juicy heirloom "toms" of the season are the essence of feasting and late summer celebration as they rest in a bowl on the deck: fresh-from-the-garden jewels, rosy and flushed and beaded with early morning dew. A wedge of Stilton or Camembert, crusty bread, a little balsamic, a sprinkling of sea salt and a few fresh basil leaves from the garden are all that is needed to complete both the scene and today's lunch.

Oh honey sweet and hazy summer abundance... That luscious word made its first appearance in the fourteenth century, coming down the years to us through Middle English and Old French from the Latin abundāns, meaning overflowing. The adjective form is abundant, and synonyms for it include: ample, generous, lavish, plentiful, copious, plenteous, exuberant, overflowing, rich,  teeming, profuse, prolific, replete, teeming, bountiful and liberal.

Abundant is the exactly the right word for these days of ripeness and plenty, as we gather in the harvest, freeze things, chuck things into jars, "put things by" and store the bounty of summer for consumption somewhere up the road. Like squirrels and chipmunks, we scurry about, collecting the stuff in our gardens and preserving it to nourish body and soul when temperatures fall and nights grow long.

For all the sweetness and abundance held out in offering by the Old Wild Mother (Earth), there is a subtle ache to these golden, late August days with their dews and hazes and ripening vegetables. These days are all too fleeting.

Thursday Poem - Assurance

You will never be alone, you hear so deep

a sound when autumn comes. Yellow

pulls across the hills and thrums,

or the silence after lightening before it

says its names—and then the clouds'

wide-mouthed apologies. You were aimed

from birth: you will never be alone.

Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,

long aisles—you never heard so deep a sound,

moss on rock, and years. You turn your head—

that’s what the silence meant: you’re not

alone. The whole wide world pours down.

William Stafford, (from The Way It Is)

For my brother James Brendan Franklin
(March 10, 1960 - August 22, 2023

Wordless Wednesday - Floating

Small Wonders

On a fine morning in late August, a weathered cedar stump along the trail into the deep woods sports a colony of haircap moss (Polytrichum commune), also called common haircap, golden maidenhair and great goldilocks.

The delicate wonders emerging from the thatch are dancing sporophytes, fragile strands topped by seed capsules wearing raindrops and filaments of spider silk. Just beyond the right edge of the photo, a crab spider waits for a fly or other insect to put in an appearance, one fraught with peril.

How often does one wander along a trail and not notice such wonders? I suspect the answer is, most of the time, for this old hen anyway. My moss colony is a miniature jeweled world, complete within itself, its glistening raindrops holding the whole sunlit forest in their depths, upside down of course.

For the life of me, I can't come up with the right words to describe it. A tiny cosmos in the sunny woods, teeming with life. Its own history. Its own mythology. Its own stories. Astonishing. Breathtaking. Radiant. Perfect.

Sequestered, Week 308 (CCCVIII)

It has been an interesting few days. Late Thursday, I slipped and took a nasty tumble down the basement stairs. No concussion or breaks, but the ligaments in my left ankle are torn, and my Achilles tendon is damaged. No mobility at all. My doctor said I would have been better off if I had just broken the ankle.

Add in serious pain, swelling and bruised muscles, and it seems I will be motionless for some time and sticking to the Mayo clinic ICE protocol (ice, compression, elevation). I have a new use for the bags of frozen veggies in my freezer (they make splendid ice packs), but I have absolutely no idea how to stay still for an hour or two, let alone a week or more. Sequestered and then some. This is going to be fun.

So.... this is the view from my chair on the deck this morning. The sunlight is grand, the temperature is cooler, and the humidity has plummeted. My canine companion is right beside me, and I have a good book and a mug of tea. If I could walk, Beau and I would potter along happily for miles today, but here we are. Harumph.

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

The earth offers gift after gift—life and the living of it, light and the return of it, the growing things, the roaring things, fire and nightmares, falling water and the wisdom of friends, forgiveness. My god, the forgiveness, time, and the scouring tides. How does one accept gifts as great as these and hold them in the mind?

Failing to notice a gift dishonors it, and deflects the love of the giver. That's what's wrong with living a careless life, storing up sorrow, waking up regretful, walking unaware. But to turn the gift in your hand, to say, this is wonderful and beautiful, this is a great gift—this honors the gift and the giver of it. Maybe this is what [my friend] Hank has been trying to make me understand: Notice the gift. Be astonished at it. Be glad for it, care about it. Keep it in mind. This is the greatest gift a person can give in return.

Kathleen Dean Moore, from Wild Comfort

Morning in the Park

Friday Ramble - In the Great Blue Bowl of Morning

We awaken to skies that would make an impressionist painter feel like dancing, to Canada geese singing in unison as they fly up from the river and out into farm fields to feed. This year's progeny sing loudest up there in the great blue bowl of morning. Their pleasure in being alive and aloft mirrors my own as I watch them with a mug of hot stuff, eyes shielded from the rising sun with a sleepy hand.

Below the sweeping strokes of vibrant color painted across the eastern sky are trees, hydro poles, rooflines and village streets, trucks and cars in rumbling motion, early runners in the park, commuters with lunch bags, bento boxes, newspapers and briefcases headed downtown to another day at their desks.

In a few weeks, the early runners and commuters will be joined by village children on their way to school, and nearby streets will be filled with happy chatter again. Beau and I have missed seeing the neighborhood kids on our summer rambles, and we are looking forward to hearing about their adventures on vacation.

On a recent morning walk, we paused by a neighbor's fish pond to watch the white and scarlet koi finning their way around in circles, and we noticed that the first fallen leaves of the season had already drifted into the pool, making eddies and swirls and perfect round spirals on the glossy surface. No need to panic, it's not an early autumn, just the blistering heat of August setting the leaf people free to ramble.

I would be a happy camper if I could paint skies like the one above, but I can't, and the camera's efforts will have to do. What my lens "sees" is absolutely sumptuous though, and I am content with the morning opus. Sky blue, rose, gold, violet and scarlet lodge in my wandering thoughts, and on the way home, I think about throwing a whole bunch of clay pots and glazing them in sunrise colors. 

Thursday Poem - From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned

toward signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside,

succulent peaches we devour,

dusty skin and all, comes the familiar

dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite

into the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom

to impossible blossom, to sweet

impossible blossom.

Li-Young Lee

Wordless Wednesday - Jewel in Summer Stillness

Spatterdock or yellow pond lily (Nuphar advena)

Trying to Be Cool

A week of blistering heat and drenching humidity. Best for staying in the shade and sipping fizzy drinks in glass tumblers (NEVER plastic) with lots of ice, slices of fruit and snippets of Mojito mint. We have been thinking wistfully of the glorious, sunny, slightly cooler September days that are (surely) only a few weeks away.

Cooking and hot food? Not so much. Most meals are cold stuff, lightly tossed salads with whatever is ripe in the garden (or tucked in the fridge) along with a drizzle of balsamic. The crunchy veggies and lovely, crisp greens on my plate are tarted up with generous dollops of fresh parsley, olives and feta. Yum.

In August, there are Carolina grasshoppers (also called road-dusters and Quakers) everywhere in the garden, and when they take sudden, swooping flight out of the tomato patch right in front of us, their airborne antics startle. 

Love the blue in the bottom of the beaker here. I seem to be drinking sky.

Sequestered, Week 307 (CCCVII)

Bumble Girls in the Basil

Sunday, Saying Yes to the World

The bigness of the world is redemption.

Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.

Being able to travel in both ways matters, and sometimes the way back into the heart of the question begins by going outward and beyond. This is the expansiveness that comes literally in a landscape or that tugs you out of yourself in a story.....

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

Ripening Under the Sun

For most of the year, I adore the old crabapple tree in the garden, its whiskery branches in winter, its new leaves and blossoms in springtime, the tiny, hard green fruit in July. Not so much at this time of the year though.

Crabapples are lovely things pickled, juiced or jellied, but picking the little dears out of the veggie patch in August and raking them out of the grass before mowing is something else entirely. The bees and the wasps do not agree.

Friday Ramble - Consider

The annual Perseid meteor shower is in progress, and this year, it will peak on August 12 - 13. I just have to write something about late summer nights and the dazzling streams of comet debris that turn pre-dawn August hours into the greatest show on earth. Until October and the Orionids that is.

Throwaway children of the Swift-Tuttle comet, the Perseids take place between July and August every year. The shower takes its name from Perseus, the constellation in the northern sky from which it appears to (but does not really) originate. Who knows, some of the particles rocketing around up there may be kin to my own star stuff. Awesome doings up there, a new extravaganza every night. The adjective "cosmic" is one of this tottery backyard astronomer's favorite adjectives.

Our wordy offering hails from around 1350 CE, tracing its origins through the Middle English word consideren and the Latin considerare, both meaning "in the company of the stars", thence the Latin sidus/sideris meaning a star or cluster of stars. At the beginning of it all is the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root form *sweid meaning to shine. Other English words like constellation and sidereal are kin, the first describing a group of stars, and the latter meaning simply "starry".

Humans are spun from the dust of ancient stars, and we are probably never more true to ourselves and our beginnings than when we are considering something, in the original sense of the word that is. The thought tickles me greatly. In doing so, we move away from the mundane and profane and intuitively toward a bone deep and authentic connection with the dimension from which we emerged, and of which we are such miniscule elements. Dancing motes in the eye of the infinite are we.

Clear summer nights are perfect times for stargazing, and so are cold clear nights when one can almost reach up and touch the stars. On late summer and early autumn nights, the sky is often filled with clouds from here to there, and one can hardly see eye or lens, let alone the wonders above us. Who doesn't love a good haze or fog though, and weather on the cusp of the seasons dishes up some splendid, atmospheric murks. Even when we can't see them, our starry kin are right up there over our heads and shining down on us. As Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote:

"We find lingering evidence of archetype in the images and symbols found in stories, literature, poetry, painting, and religion. It would appear that its glow, its voice, and its fragrance are meant to cause us to be raised up from contemplating the shit on our tails to occasionally traveling in the company of the stars."

Thursday Poem - This

This is what was bequeathed us:
This earth the beloved left
And, leaving,

Left to us.

No other world
But this one:
Willows and the river
And the factory

With its black smokestacks.

No other shore, only this bank
On which the living gather.

No meaning but what we find here.

No purpose but what we make.

That, and the beloved's clear instructions:
Turn me into song; sing me awake.

Gregory Orr

(from How Beautiful the Beloved)

Wordless Wednesday - Ripening

Will you step into my parlor?

Female goldenrod spider (Misumena vatia)

A few cicadas are singing in the garden as I write this, but there are not quite as many minstrels as there were a week ago, and the realization is bittersweet. Sometimes, Beau and I encounter living cicadas on our morning walks, and we move them carefully off sidewalks and roads to the safety of nearby grassy verges.

When we come across the mortal husks of expired cicadas, we gather them up gently and lay them to rest in a quiet corner of the garden under an antique rose. It is something we do every year, saying "thank you" as we tuck the precious little beings into the good dark earth with an old teaspoon. Hail the travelers.

August brings fogs and splendid morning dews, and a little after sunrise, the garden is lavishly strewn with dewdrops. From a distance, blooms twinkle like constellations in the early light, and they make a fine leitmotif for these late summer days.

This morning, several antique roses are tenanted by canny goldenrod spiders who are hiding among the petals and ready to pounce on unwary beetles, wasps and flies. The little dears can have all the Japanese beetles they want.

Sequestered, Week 306 (CCCVI)

The morning had an eerie, post-apocalyptic look, leaden skies and a dense haze caused by smoke and ash blowing in from forest fires in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. An orangey red sun rose over the trees, a baleful start to the day.

Beau and I took our usual morning walk, but we didn't go as far as we usually do because of the abysmal air quality. There were ashes in the wind - we could smell them and taste them on the backs of our tongues. Breathing was difficult, and we decided shortening our ramble was a good idea.

As we pottered along, I thought about "after the fall" novels like The Road by Cormac McCarthy, The Postman by David Brin, and a long ago favorite (read in university), Walter Miller's classic A Canticle for Leibowitz. Given what is happening in the great wide world right now, perhaps such musings are not surprising.

It was good to come home. The usual watering and weeding chores were carried out when we returned to our roost, and we are indoors again, probably for the rest of the day. I have a good book and a mug of tea. Beau has his favorite stuffie.